Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah

“Forged in the crucibles of difference” – Adichie’s race blogger as a “plural personality”  

Adichie’s novel Americanah (AM) is a hybrid text that crosses geographic, culture, and media boundaries using the “plural personality” (Anzaldúa 1987 2175) of the female protagonist as a source of cultural strength and assertion to help the reader question the essentializing reading of the racialized label “Black” in a so-called “colour blind” (AM 363) US.

            As a “race blogger” (AM 376), Ifemelu not only assumes the voice of “the diasporic other” baring her “ruptured” (AM 469) self, she undergoes various transformations. Over the course of the novel Adichie’s female protagonist comes to reject the sweeping generalisation of the racialized label “black” (AM 470) that Ifemelu seems to have automatically “acquired” when choosing to come to the US: “Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black” (AM 273). In her relationship with the “hot white ex” (AM 366) she is confronted with white America’s essentializing image of Africa that reduces the entire continent to a homogenous rather primitive space, where Nigeria is just like “Ghana” (AM 209) full of “AIDS” (AM 170), “starvation” (AM 341) and “millions who live on less than a dollar a day” (AM 207). In the eyes of Kimberly, Don and Laura, Ifemelu, thus, despite her middle-class origins and education, becomes the “beautiful” (AM 180) other, the nanny from Nigeria, one of the deserving poor, who is worthy of charity and can be paid “in cash under the table” (AM 179), but is expected to “be grateful, we let you into this country” (AM 377). After her relationship with Curt fails when she cheats on him, he echoes that sentiment: “I was so good to you” (AM 357) which makes Ifemelu realize that “she had not entirely believed herself while with him [nor in] his ability to twist life into the shapes he wanted” (AM 355). He had turned her into a “stranger” (AM 370) to herself who no longer knows (AM 370) the “person she was before Curt” (AM 370). Even in the relationship with her African American boyfriend, the rules may have “shifted, fallen into the cracks” (AM 389), but the “sweep” and “simplicity” of the judgment of Blaine’s sister Shan reduces Ifemelu once more to her “exotic credential, that whole Authentic African thing” (AM 389). Within America’s binary construction of black and white, where black means the descendants of former slaves and white the descendants of former slave owners, Ifemelu fits neither category. Thus, Ifemelu, unlike Aunt Uju neither fully rejects America’s “corrupting” influence (AM 255), nor does she immerse herself completely in the “real America” (AM 149) by mimicking the mainstream mostly white aesthetics like her school friend Ginika. Feeling not only “removed from the things he [Blaine] believed, and the things he knew” (AM 387), but also from America’s self-deluding pretense that black and white in America were the same, “avoiding race” (AM 369) altogether. She seems to become “plural personality” (Anzaldúa 1987 2175) who is able to assume a different hybrid perspective which, as Audre Lorde formulated it, “[has] been forged in the crucibles of difference” (Lorde 1984 2898). Consequently, she comes to inhabit what Gloria Anzaldúa calls the “crossroads” (Anzaldúa 1987 3176), an inbetween that seemingly bridges the simplistic binary which allows her (and by extension the reader) to critically engage with the question of race and racism on her blog.

Taking inventory of the complicated construct that is “race” in the United States, Ifemelu uses the Internet as a medium to not only share her “observations” (AM 4), she also creates a “safe space” (AM 380) for herself and others to exchange life experiences and “unzip” (AM 380) outside of the oppressive demands of cultural depth in academic discourse (AM 386) and the effacing political correctness of America’s “colour blind” (AM 363) diversity workshops and multicultural talks (AM 377). As the blog is embedded in the novel, Adichie’s text also becomes a genre-hybrid that seems defy categorization, extending Ifemelu’s digital safe haven of articulation to the novel. Consequently, this juxtaposition of Ifemelu’s ruminations about “race” with the “multiple demands of affiliations” (Chude-Soker 2014, 54) in her personal relations that are revealed in multiple anecdotes which activate different intersecting categories such as class and gender, the reader is able to unwrap and deconstruct the different discourses surrounding the seemingly contradictory notions of “blackness” in a “colour blind” or post-racial America.

Works Cited:

Adichie Chimamanda Ngozi, Americanah (London: Fourth Estate, 2013), Kindle edition.

Anzaldúa Gloriana, Boarderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizza. 1987. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Print.

Chude-Soker Louis, “The Newly Black Americans: African Immigrants and black Americans”. Transition. 114 (2014): 52-71. Project Muse. Web.

Lorde Audre, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114. 2007. Print. 

Further Reading:

The Guardian: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Review

TED Talk: The Danger of the Single Story